Prisoner Of Nippon

Ray S. Stubbs’ Prisoner of Nippon belongs to that severe corner of the Second World War shelf where the word “adventure” has been taken outside and quietly told to stop making a fool of itself. This is the account of a British serviceman captured by the Japanese and forced into the long, brutal arithmetic of prisoner-of-war survival: hunger, labour, fear, disease, punishment, exhaustion, and the daily business of remaining alive while history behaves as though men are spare parts.

The title has a bleak plainness to it. No flourish, no patriotic drumroll, no cinematic mist drifting across the parade ground. Prisoner of Nippon says what it is and leaves the reader to do the flinching. Captivity under the Japanese was not a matter of sitting behind wire waiting for liberation to become administratively convenient. For many men it meant being worked, starved, beaten and neglected in conditions that turned days into trials and bodies into ledgers of what had been endured.

Stubbs writes from inside that experience, where the war is not seen from the map room but from the camp, the work detail, the ration line, the sickbed, the memory of home, and the narrow gap between today and tomorrow. The grand phrases of empire and strategy are all very well from a distance, but they become rather less persuasive when reduced to rice, sores, mud, guards, orders and the persistent question of whether one can get through another twenty-four hours without being permanently removed from the story.

There is a particular bitter irony in these Far East POW memoirs: men who had been sent to defend civilisation found themselves discovering just how thin civilisation could be when uniforms, flags and rules no longer guaranteed mercy. The ordinary soldier, who had probably expected danger in some recognisable military form, instead met captivity as a grinding system, one that did not need drama because repetition was cruel enough.

This is not the decorative kind of wartime book, the sort that looks handsome beside a model aircraft and allows everyone to feel safely nostalgic. It is testimony. It is memory refusing to become a soft-focus anecdote. It is one man setting down what happened before the world tidies it into “hardship” and moves on to something more comfortable. Books like this are not cheerful company, but they do have the awkward habit of being necessary.

Good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. It has lived a bit, as seems only proper for a book about survival rather than upholstery. A solid copy of a hard account, ready for the shelf where the Second World War is allowed to be grim, human, badly lit, and considerably less tidy than the commemorative plates would prefer.

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